Who is running the world?

What are Politically Exposed Persons?

Politically exposed persons (PEP) is a term from the financial services industry to describe individuals who have been entrusted with a prominent public function. This might include members of cabinets, parliaments, senior public servants and military personnel, or managers of state-owned companies.

Being classified as a PEP does not imply any misconduct. However, the concept is important because PEPs and members of their families should be the subject of enhanced public scrutiny. Identifying PEPs and conducting enhanced due diligence on the origins of their wealth is mandated by financial crime laws in most countries.

Our take on PEP data

The scope of PEP data is less well-defined compared to anti-money laundering datasets such as sanctions lists. Our goal is therefore to make the scope and depth of our data coverage transparent and publish the underlying methodology.

By mapping out the political positions that should be included on a country-by-country basis, we define quality metrics that measure coverage across time, jurisdiction and level of government.

We focus on automating the collection of PEP data rather than relying on the manual monitoring political events and election results. Our ultimate objective is to help expand the coverage of political persons in community-driven data resources like Wikidata. This way, the information ultimately becomes a commodity, produced via a distributed process.

Data coverage

Our top priority is comprehensive coverage of PEPs at national level of influence.

Where is our PEP data sourced from?

OpenSanctions automatically monitors and imports global databases into our data, such as lists of world leaders. We are also expanding our coverage of nationally published data, such as lists of parliamentarians or state governors. We enrich the PEP data with further information about the potential influence of officeholders, e.g. to reflect a person holding both a public office and running a business.

Official sources are government authorities and inter-governmental agencies. Non-official sources are community, civil-society or journalistic organisations, including:

• Wikidata Politically Exposed Persons data is maintained by volunteers in a similar manner to the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation projects. OpenSanctions monitors specific positions in national and sub-national legislatures, executives and senior administrators for changes. As a volunteer-driven project, there are very limited guarantees of how up-to-date the information is.
• mySociety's EveryPolitician project contains a significant foundation of data for national legislatures. However, its maintenance ended in June 2019 and the data is quickly becoming more outdated. We aim to remove or replace this dataset in time.

How do I use the data?

You can download the PEP bulk data or look up individual entries using the API. Commercial users can license the dataset as part of the OpenSanctions bulk data license. We do not offer a separate licensing option for PEPs data alone.

Our methodology documentation explains how PEP position information can be used to select custom subsets of the data for specific use cases.

How can I help?

If you want to help map out political positions and their office holders, please consider using one of the following paths:

• Want to add or enrich individual PEP profiles? Contribute to Wikidata's WikiProject Every Politician. This is a community-driven effort to maintain a database of political positions. Like all Wikipedia projects, it has community review and verification standards. Start by getting a sense of Wikidata's political data model, and allow for a delay of several days for Wikidata edits to be reflected in OpenSanctions.
• Want to add a bulk data crawler? Our crawlers are open source code, using the zavod data collection framework (Python). Check out the data inclusion criteria, and the crawler writing tutorial. Our data source wishlist is a good source of inspiration.
• Want to partner up? Please feel free to reach out to us to discuss other ideas for collaboration. As we are cleaning up and enhancing the position listings above using bulk data processing techniques, individual corrections sent via email will be of somewhat limited benefit.